Apart from being made up of script and DHTML code, scriptlets can seem to be similar to ordinary ActiveX controls. To be honest, there are a number of substantial differences if you look at the implementation level. Nevertheless, ActiveX controls and scriptlets share a common idea and a common baseline. This makes them nearly identical to the users' eyes. In fact, the way you program them and the way you embed them in HTML pages is similar. It seems that scriptlets have been designed to become, sooner or later, a Web counterpart of ordinary ActiveX controls.
In this paragraph, we're going to examine and compare them. We aren't aiming to find and proclaim a winner. Our goal is simpler: just to let you know about differences and similarities.
Four areas are under examination:
Compatibility and Security are also discussed in more detail, and from a wider viewpoint, later in the chapter. Deployment will be the subject of a chapter in our Advanced Topics section, at the end of the book and implementing scriptlets is of course the subject of the book!
Here, we'll focus on the impact these topics may have on scriptlets, especially in comparison with ActiveX controls.